The present disclosure relates to computer resource tracking and, more specifically, to analyzing network traffic.
Cloud computing providers offer their services according to several fundamental models: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and software as a service (SaaS) where IaaS is the most basic and each higher model abstracts from the details of the lower models. In the most basic cloud-service model, providers of IaaS offer computers—physical or virtual machines—and other resources.
For example, a hypervisor can run various virtual machines as guests and pools of hypervisors within the cloud operational support-system can support large numbers of virtual machines and the ability to scale services up and down according to customers' varying requirements. IaaS clouds often offer additional resources such as a virtual-machine disk image library, raw block storage, and file or object storage, firewalls, load balancers, IP addresses, virtual local area networks (VLANs), and software bundles. IaaS-cloud providers supply these resources on-demand from their large pools installed in data centers.
To deploy their applications, cloud users install operating-system images and their application software on the cloud infrastructure. In this model, the cloud user patches and maintains the operating systems and the application software. Cloud providers typically bill services (e.g., IaaS, SaaS, etc.) on a utility computing basis wherein the cost reflects the amount of resources allocated and consumed.
As cloud service usage grows in many business and enterprises, these organizations may benefit from identifying how much and how often cloud services are being utilized by personnel within the organization.